I came up to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1966. Ours was a—perhaps the—transitional generation. We were past the midpoint of the 1960s—the Mods had come and gone and the Beatles were about to record Sgt. Pepper—but the King’s into which I was matriculated was still strikingly traditional. Dinner in Hall was formal, begowned—and required. Undergraduates took their seats, awaited the arrival of the Fellows, then rose to watch a long line of elderly gentlemen shuffle past them on their way to High Table.

“Elderly” here is no relative term. Led by (former provost) Sir John Shepherd (born 1881), the Emeritus Fellows typically included Sir Frank Adcock (born 1886), E.M. Forster (born 1879), and others equally venerable. One was made immediately aware of the link between a generation of young men born into the postwar welfare state and the world of late-Victorian King’s: the age of Forster, Rupert Brooke, and John Maynard Keynes, exuding a cultural and social self-confidence to which we could never aspire. The old men seemed to blend seamlessly into the fading portraits on the walls above: without anyone making a point of it, continuity was all about us.

Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010)
Tuli Kupferberg, "A Short History of the Human Race"

I've been waiting to see and try out one of these print-on-demand machines, another option in the transforming book world, since I first read about it Joseph Epstein's book The Book Business a few years ago. According to Adrian Versteegh's article in the March/April 2010 Poets & Writers, Epstein and Dane Neller co-founded of the New York-based company that debuted the EBM four years ago, and the company

has entered partnerships with the Open Content Alliance, Lightning Source, and Google Books, giving users access to over three million titles, both proprietary and public domain. The "ATM for books," as Neller describes their device, has so far been installed at about twenty-eight locations throughout North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Africa, including the University of Michigan, McGill University, and the University of Melbourne. On Demand expects the EBM—which sells for slightly over a hundred thousand dollars, depending on the choice of printer—to have found its way into at least forty independent bookstores by the second quarter of 2010.

Versteegh notes that so far, universities and their presses, and self-publishing authors have been the major users of such machines, but sales have been low, and for the vanity system, a stigma remains. (As the large, traditional publishing conglomerates vanish, how much longer will this be case?) He adds that most of the books produced by these machines aren't in bookstores, and most readers are encountering POD-ready books online, via Amazon and online publishing organs like Lulu and iUniverse, though given that this is increasingly the way most readers, especially in the US, are coming into contact with books. If more of these machines and databases featuring out-of-print, hard-to-find and rare but desired books become available, it would be a boon for writers and publishers, especially those that focus on the "long tail" approach. Another way of looking at such machines is that a book never need go out of print now, and, should one not have access to an e-reader and want a print book, one can hold one in no time.

Speaking of bookstores, Barnes & Noble, the largest bricks-and-mortar book retailer, is planning to hock itself. With the rise of online bookselling and the popularity of e-readers like the Kindle and the iPad's iBook app, I figured this was coming sooner or later. (Is anyone buying Barnes & Noble's Nook?) Will one response be the return of small, independent booksellers in some cities, as the Wall Street Journal article above suggests? Is this the twilight of the bookselling conglomerates?

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Speaking of books, Taylor Antrim writes in a recent The Daily Beast piecethat that beguiling but unloved creature of the American prose fictional world, the novella, is making a comeback. (English 394 students, all of whom have written at least one by the time you graduated, take note!) Sort of. This makes sense to me especially now that people's attention spans and leisure habits (and time) are changing (if not shrinking) to a sizable degree because of digital technologies. Or so some researchers suggest. My own experience, I should say, bears them out.

In addition to Melville House, the novella-focused, Brooklyn-based publisher of old (Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol) and new (Tao Lin, Imre Kertesz) short novelistic works, and New Directions, which has been publishing novellas for years, including under its Bibelot line and now in its $10 Pearls line, bigger publishers and a number of contemporary authors are getting into the act. Takeaway quote:

But it's not just a pair of small presses championing an underdog form. Even the major houses have proved themselves surprisingly novella-friendly (though they seem to prefer the more approachable term “short novel”). Scribner gave us Don DeLillo's wispy thin Point Omega in February and Ann Beattie's Walks With Men (July) is the most sneakily intelligent read of the summer. No, novellas don't score blockbuster sales—even Stephenie Meyer's new Eclipse novella The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner from Little, Brown put up disappointing numbers in its first week—but they're around, people are writing them (see also Ian McEwan, Rick Moody, Nicholson Baker, newcomer Josh Weil, and others), and they're a reminder in a digital age that a printed book need not be a cumbersome relic. I can slip Walks With Men into my back pocket on the way to the park. A Kindle? Not so much.

Antrim goes on to ask what a novella is. His answer: a pretty short novel that need not be heavily plotted, though neither does a long or very long novel need to be. He also cites Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel, a delightfully sad little enigma of a book, to say that any two of its pages might not stand out, but the cumulative effect is significant, which one should extrapolate to novellas in general. In a short story, of course, any two pages had better stand out, since they might constitute the entire story; in a novel, any twenty pages might not. Antrim ends by discussing Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03, the new French sensation I cannot claim to have read, but which I've read a great deal about. It's a lyrical novella about a suburban teen who empathizes and falls in love with a developmentally disabled girl, which sounds all wrong....

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

What a great piece of news: this afternoon, Judge Vaughn Walker, of the United States District Court of Northern California, issued a careful, thoughful, and earthshaking ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, striking down the heinous Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that two years ago withdrew equal marriage laws in the State of California. Walker stated in his judgment that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional "under both the due process and equal protection clauses," and ordered "entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement."

The judgment was a tremendous victory for same-sex couples, who had briefly enjoyed equal marriage laws in California after the state Supreme Court ruled, in In re Marriage Cases 43 Cal.4th 757 [76 Cal.Rptr.3d 683, 183 P.3d 384], in May 2008, that California's constitution permitted them. It was also a victory for the plaintiff's lawyers, Ted Olson, the former Solicitor General under George W. Bush, and David Boies, who had argued on opposing sides in the case representing one of the worst recent rulings by the US Supreme Court, 2000's Bush v. Gore.

California's Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had previously twice vetoed the state legislature's passage of marriage equality bills, hailed today's ruling as an affirmation of "the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves."

Opponents of Judge Walker's ruling have already filed appeals, and the case will likely go to the US Supreme Court. According to the New York Times's John Schwartz, Walker's ruling will make it more difficult for the US Supreme Court to overturn on appeal, mainly because of "the careful logic and structure of Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s opinion." With the current conservative quintet, which shows little concern for precedent or legal logic, however, the outcome is unclear, but what is clear is that today's decision was a momentous one, and a huge step forward after several recent steps backward (Maine, New Jersey, New York, etc.) on the marriage equality front.

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SoCordoba House, an Islamic cultural center (and not a "mosque," though that would have been fine in my eyes as well) is slated to be built two blocks north of the World Trade Center Ground Zero site, as the New York City Landmarks Commission voted to allow the demolition of the prior building at 45-47 Park Place in lower Manhattan. The 13-story cultural center, which will include a prayer room and a 9/11 memorial, will rise, once its developer raises $100 million, despite the spate of hateful, misinformed rhetoric by a number of major conservatives, like current post-children and disgraced Republican politicians Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.

Let us never forget, as we to often do, what comes out of these right-wingers' mouths, how toxic and corrosive it is, and also how this bigotry that they're currently spewing against Muslims and Islam has readily and frequently been applied throughout American history to Black Americans, women, Latinos, Asians and Asian Americans, Jewish people, Roman Catholics, immigrants in general, gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people (cf. above), disabled people, the poor, and on and on. They always find and target scapegoats, with destructive effects, and unless we speak out, we ratify their hate.

As others across the web have pointed out, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of whom I'm hardly a fan, gave a marvelous, moving speech yesterday defending the Muslim cultural center and the history of immigration and the ideas of religious freedom and pluralism in the US. It was for me one of the high points of his public career, and something that far more of our political figures need to do. To the rest of the pols on the Left, center, and yes, those on the right--who believe in the Constitution and aren't gripped by xenophobia and cynicism--who've been silent, step up to the mic!

Monday, August 02, 2010

I can hardly believe August is already here. Just two weeks ago I realized graduation was only a month ago, though it's sometimes felt like I've been home three months and at others like no more than, well, a couple of weeks. July is a hot blur; one minute a cool spring and moderate June were winding down and then the outdoors, at least out here, turned into the inside of a kiln. I have been writing steadily and drawing (and animating, gardening, baking, etc.), but whenever I've tried to complete entries here, lassitude overwhelms me. So I still have a number of posts from July to complete; many of them have made it only to the draft stage, but I do want to post them before we get too far into August, and find myself trying to keep up with this month....

}}}

Some news about projects and so forth: a while back I mentioned the French essay on Abdellah Taïa's novel Une mélancolie arabethat I toiled over last year, for the Montreal-based journal Spirale. It is now published, as part of the "théâtres de la cruauté: du jamais vu" dossier edited by Nathalie Stephens, whom I want to thank once again for all of her excellent guidance, edits, suggestions, patience, and support. (Many thanks also to Catherine Mavrakakis, whose editorial help was also crucial.) If you read French, you can download Nathalie's introductory essay ("Présentation"), which engagingly explores the dossier's key themes and constellation of ideas and provides an overview of the contributions, which includes essays exploring texts that range from Diamanda Galas's Guilty guilty guilty and David Wojnarowicz's Close the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration and In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz, to Maryse Condé's Comme deux frères, to assorted works by Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst. Unfortunately these essays are not accessible by download, but if you're really interested in them and read French, you can order a copy via the link above.

Also, improved versions of my translations of Dominican poet Mateo Morrison's poems, and my translation of one of Congolese-Francophone writer Alain Mabanckou's poems have been accepted and will appear, I believe, later this year in different journals. I haven't done too many translations this summer, but I will eventually post several of the ones I did complete, nearly all by Brazilian writers: poets Ana Cristina Cesar and Paulo Leminski, two major figures in Brazil's late 20th century literary avant-garde, and fiction writer João Gilberto Noll, whom I learned about from colleagues both at and outside the university. Between this blog and unpublished translations, I think I've translated close to 20 writers thus far, and one hope for the future is that I can get more of these into print and, if possible, be able to translate more complete books (or book-length collections of different writers' works).